In Marcinelle, a mining town in Wallonia (Belgium), 262 miners, mostly Italians, died in the “Bois du Cazier” mine on August 8, 1956. August 8 of this year has become an occasion for a disgusting nationalistic rhetoric in line with the hypocritical establishment of the “National Day of the Sacrifice of Italian Labor in the World.” Meloni said, “On this day, we also honor this great history and renew the bond with our compatriots abroad, men and women in love with Italy and who contribute to making our homeland beloved and appreciated in the world.” Also in first line of the celebrations were other members of the current Fascist government, which is preparing, after several liberticidal and repressive decrees and after the anti-polar and racist differentiated autonomy law, to push through the premierate counter-reform with the aim of crystallizing a Fascist regime.
Proletarians, peasants and small farmers have paid, since the late 1800s, and continue to pay to this day, a very high price in terms of forced emigration, deaths on the job abroad, discrimination, racism and lynching, because of the unification of Italy based on economic and social interests and logics that are structurally anti-worker, anti-popular and anti-democratic. Italy is the only country in the world that has exported millions and millions of proletarians and peasants, an emigration that has enormously impoverished entire regions of the country, as in the case of the halving of the Sardinian population. The holy alliance between the financial and industrial capital of the North and the great latifundia, including in particular the feudal and semi-feudal latifundia of the Center-South, resulted in the establishment of a dominant bloc that, while passing through various processes of restructuring, based its rule on the super-exploitation of the industrial proletariat, the systematic impoverishment and servile oppression of the peasant masses and the semi-colonial management of the South. A historical constant that has been maintained over time until it found a devastating repetition in the policies of the current fascist government.
Mussolini’s fascism continued the work of reactionary liberals and the monarchy. Following the approval by the” Grand Council of fascism” of the Grandi agenda (July 1943), much of the fascist regime together with the monarchy was reproduced and recycled within the framework of the hegemony of the U.S. and GB forming the basis, together with the contribution of the Vatican, for that so-called democratic and constitutional “new state” which, thanks to the turn and reactionary degeneration of Togliatti’s PCI, essentially saved and reintegrated even the mussolinian repubblichini.
This is the state that, among its many countless infamies, theorized that the real solution to the problems of the Italian economy consisted in promoting emigration abroad and that, in line with such claims, in 1947 with the De Gasperi government and the signing of the Italo-Belgian protocol, literally sold 63,000 Italian workers to Belgium for work in mines, largely obsolete and notoriously inadequate, if not substantially lacking in structures to guarantee the safety of workers. All in exchange for coal for the big industrial monopolies in northern Italy. Proletarians and peasants forced by an infamous Italian capitalism, by an enduring imperialism with semi-feudal traits, to work in the mines in inhumane conditions until the inevitable tragedy, up to the hundreds of work-related deaths at Marcinelle.
Deaths therefore primarily caused by Italian capitalism and the Italian state, deaths in the workplace that the rhetorical nationalist and fascist celebrations of these days smuggle in as “deaths for the homeland,” deaths whose “sacrifice” is exalted for the “interests of the nation.” Deaths murdered by the same interests and logics that every year reap tens of thousands of deaths at work (through accidents and inauspicious outcomes of occupational diseases, most of them not even recognized). All this in a country that reduces the safeguarding of workers’ health and safety to a farce, that uses companies’ competent doctors (at the service of the bosses) to marginalize, mobilize and fire workers, and that with the very recent Meloni decree, not coincidentally following the heinous episode in Latina with an undocumented laborer left to bleed to death by the bosses and the corporals, legalizes practically any violation, requiring the very few existing “labor inspectors” to provide in advance, in a congruous timeframe, to notify companies regarding inspections. This is compared to the already meager and haphazard regulations on workplace safety and irregular labor inspections.
Honoring the dead of Marcinelle means uniting class struggle and union organizing with the struggle for the overthrow of fascism and the suppression of Italy’s abhorrent imperialism.
FOR THE PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACY